Even so, the sheer paucity of plausible alternatives make ousting Sunak from the position of Chancellor a tricky business, much as his neighbour at No 10 might want to given Sunak’s lack of full-throated support for the Prime Minister over partygate.
The hot favourite is Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, where a straight job swap seemingly provides a relatively painless solution to the problem. But though a darling of the party, with obligatory tax cutting intentions, she is far from loved by many fellow MPs, among whom she is quite widely regarded as a lightweight and a faux Brexiteer. The nakedness of her ambition and self promotion is also seen as unseemly. By the way, there is a fair amount of misogyny in these views, but that’s politics for you. At least she would cut taxes.
Other possibilities are Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, and Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, both Johnson loyalists, and perhaps less vulnerable to Treasury capture than some. But neither is obviously well qualified for the position, and as for Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, it would look pretty odd to give him a second chance at the wheel, having already forced him out once for not doing his master’s bidding. He’s also apparently been guilty of the same non-dom “sin” as Sunak’s wife.
The long shot would be Jeremy Hunt, the archetypal safe pair of hands, but as a Remainer who stood against Johnson in the fight for the leadership, it may still be too early to welcome him back into the fold.
In any case, that very lack of credible alternatives may be Sunak’s best chance of survival. He’s still spitting tacks over the way the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast of the largest fall in living standards since records began upstaged his own £9bn of tax cuts in the Spring Statement, but what did he expect?
The OBR might, I suppose, have spared the Chancellor’s blushes by not spelling it out quite so bluntly, leaving it to others to draw their own conclusions, but if that’s what the numbers say, then it is part of the OBR’s purpose to point it out. The OBR was deliberately set up to speak truth to power.
